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Provo Daily Herald Merit Pay for Teachers?
On Wednesday, New York City and its teachers union announced a pay-for-performance plan. This presents a good opportunity to set aside the current dispute over school vouchers to talk about an issue that's fundamental to quality education -- merit pay. "Merit pay programs, which break from salary schedules based on seniority and degrees, have traditionally been opposed by teachers unions," the New York Times reported this week. "But they have been gaining ground across the country in recent years, and the idea is likely to get a major lift with its adoption in the nation's largest school system." Should merit pay come to Utah? We think it's a terrific idea if it can be administered in such a way that it truly rewards the best teachers and not just paper tigers. Let's begin by saying that our hat is off to anyone who can spend five days a week, nine months a year, in a room with little ... darlings ... trying to teach them. That is, when they're not playing video games or text-messaging their friends. Utah's best teachers are enthusiastic, going above and beyond the call of duty. They also happen to be highly marketable, which may be causing some of the concern in the anti-voucher camp. It is not a healthy fear, in our view. That's how the free market should work. Wages should follow the law of supply and demand. The best performers should command higher salaries. The difficulty comes when merit pay systems are proposed in union shops. Collective bargaining agreements generally lay out pay grades based on criteria such as years of service and college degrees rather than performance. But as granddaddy used to say, some people have 20 years' experience; others have one year's experience 20 times. Clearly, Utah needs to retain its best teachers. Yet blanket salary increases, like the $349 million the Utah Legislature appropriated this year, are not the way to go. You retain the poor teachers right along with the good ones. If the goal is to improve education, money needs to be targeted more carefully to areas that deliver greatest return. And so the question remains: What sort of system could be designed so that the best teachers can be rewarded. We don't think New York's complex plan should be adopted here. This is our suggestion: Each year give, say, two-thirds of the teacher raise pool to the top one-third of teachers. Great, some might say, but how can the top teachers be identified? Too many people think there is no way to measure performance except through mundane metrics like test scores. We think that scores are fine and be part of a compensation formula. But teaching is a subjective art in many respects. So why shouldn't an evaluation system contain a strong subjective element as well? One of the greatest obstacles to entrepreneurial thinking and dynamic performance in any business is the assumption that human beings can be measured solely by finite standards -- a test result, or by the number of seminars attended. Those may be a valid part of an evaluation system, but they are far from conclusive about quality. At the same time, a frequently overlooked resource is right before our eyes. The school principal. Every good manager in private business knows who his or her best employees are. No special test is required to acquire this knowledge; performance can be seen in everyday interactions and results. In short we trust front-line managers to see quality. In the case of schools, the front-line manager is the principal. So we'd like to float an idea: What would happen if principals were unshackled when it comes to teacher raises? What would happen if two-thirds of the raise pool were to be spread according to a principal's subjective analysis of the work group? We can hear the hue and cry now: "Favoritism!" But we don't think that this would become a major problem. It isn't a huge problem in business for one reason: It is in a manager's best interest to reward the top performers to keep them connected to the enterprise, not to patronize muttonheads. Fair rewards help prevent turnover in the very group of employees that a business can least afford to churn -- the top performers. Rewarding the best performers is essential to the maintenance of quality in any organization. Top performers make managers look good and the business more profitable. By contrast, rewarding weak performers is largely a waste of money. Churn in that group is tolerable. A system would need to be designed to minimize favoritism, of course. For example, the front-line manager, the principal, could be evaluated on the school's performance trend as a whole, or by other means. Could such a freewheeling system be tolerated in a union environment? Not as now constituted. For this to happen, teachers would have to united behind the idea. Nor could it be easily tolerated in the bureaucracy of public school administration, which too often reflects an overemphasis on paper credentials and not enough on actual results. This is why Bill Gates or Steve Jobs would not be allowed to teach public school in Utah. Never mind that they're extraordinary; they're both college dropouts. Sorry, Steve, you can't get a job here. We think it's time for teachers in Utah to take the bull by the horns and propose something constructive for education reform besides "Give us more money." We note that Utah's funding level of $5,000 per student pales by comparison to Washington, D.C.'s $17,000. Yet Washington has one of the worst systems in America. Could it be time for teachers to rethink the union paradigm that was introduced in Utah in the early 1960s? Would a free market in education labor and compensation yield greater quality on the whole for Utah's children? These are questions worth pondering. Meaningful merit pay for the top public school teachers is widely supported in principle. But it can only happen if unionized teachers themselves drive the initiative. The Daily Herald will publish comments on Oct. 28. |
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